Ottomans are hilariously easy. Do you play on ironman and care about achievements? Cause there are a lot of fun countries to do with achievements as a goal. Sweden is great if you haven't played them, can do "lion of the north" and "sweden is not overpowered." Should also do an italian minor game and form italy if you haven't.

Forming India is also very interesting. They have really crappy ideas but Indian provinces are rich with lots of manpower.

Sweden is a good idea, thanks. India too, I tried once with Jaunpur but gave it up when I got surrounded by people allied against me.

I think favorite campaigns (assuming you have all dlc):

(Slowly) unify Japan
Brandenburg - Prussia
Orissa trade monster
Ryukyu world conquest
Luck of the Irish
Byzantium into Rome
Lubeck trade empire
Form Netherlands as minor

As a side note, I think Aragon is the strongest European power.

I usually do a brandenburg-Prussia campaign every time i start to play again after an expansion or two and want to check out the new mechanics. Always an interesting game balancing the slow pace of early expansion in HRE due to heavy AE with trying to eat into poland/TO, and then cool goals in terms of forming prussia, turning empire protestant, space marine soldiers, etc.

Netherlands and Irish real fun too.
I'm actually doing an Aragon campaign now cause goofy posting his game inspired me to play again. I'm going for the consulate of the sea achievement (own all Med centers of trade). They def are very strong because the Med is basically your lake with your large starting fleet, galley combat bonus from traditions, and Naples, and you can very quickly and easily completely dominate the Genoa node and get mega rich. Plus there's the alternative option of allying England if they don't rival you at start, letting you smash France between you (although would need to ally Castille to prevent stabbing in the back). Biggest issue I'm running into is the ideas are garbage later on in terms of land warfare, trying to fight Ottomans/France/other countries with military bonuses is rough, but if you can snag the free PU w/ Castille you can get the pretty strong Spain ideas.

Its ~1560 in my game atm, started off with a no-cb war on Byz to vassal them, have fed them Athens, Cyprus and all of the Greek islands, and they are a march so pretty decent army and fleet. More importantly, they totally cock-block the Ottomans since they lose out on Constantinople and Byz saps a lot of their trade. Plan is to eventually feed them all the rest of their Ottoman cores, but Ottomans are terror despite me stealing Byz and Egypt, they inherited Crimea in the first 50 years and are already fielding a 110k army. Unfortunately, the final COTs I need are the Ottoman ones. They had an alliance w/ France for ~60 years that I finally managed to break, so hopefully me and Austria (which PUed and integrated Hungary) can dunk them.

Some centers were hard to get, yeah. I think you should get Iberian Wedding like 90% of time as Aragon. Just keep disinheriting heirs until you get one that is doesn't match Castille's ruler/heir. You'll also get it if you go into queen regency and they have king, so you def want to make your ruler general and send him to the front.

Arargon game this summer was actually my longest game. I think I took the final Mediterranean centers only at like 1700. I did finish that game with WC and One Faith though, last province was converted 11 days before the game ended . Took so much playing around with states and coring so that I could assign clergy to bunch random russian provinces for conversion bonus. Asia was also very troublesome since european vassals didn't convert trade company regions which meant I had to integrate the vassals and convert the land myself. Going revolutionary really harmed the converting speed. Other than that, revolutionary was completely insane though although it felt bad to depose the house Trestamara.

I think quickly going to gold coast, cape, india and malacca is the ideal plan. Europe can be dealt after you have infinite money. My final trade income was something like 5k. I really want to do a playthrough where I try to maximize trade income, but it is probably too tedious since it requires WC.

My problem is colonization is so tedious it makes me lose interests in campaigns faster. Really wish they could just implement an auto-colonization feature, designate X provinces/states/colonial regions to colonize and AI will automatically send colonists to the best provinces in order. Of course that wouldn't help my problem where every area I colonize I just start conquering all the natives and juicy gold mines which distracts me from the achievement I was trying to do and leads to me never finishing since I get too strong.

I'm sure if I spend the next 50 years colonizing and getting rich I will just never finish the game vs 50 years of removing kebab.

That just sounds like torturous abuse of game mechanics, I can't even conquer the world as LOL Russia

Why slowly? Is it hard?

I think you should only colonize Africa and Asia. Something I recently learned was that if you completely kill the mother country, you get all their colonies. So if you remove all "Portugal", you'll get all Portuguese colonial nations for free. I agree that colonization isn't great, but it isn't that bad. Just leave few units in building colony and ignore it until it is complete. Another tip: if you use the kill natives button and kill all natives in province, when the colony finishes it will have your own culture and religion instead of local ones. (American and Australian colonies will have your culture and religion anyways, but others won't.)

In a way, it is true that is bit tedious. On the other hand, it is cool to prove it to yourself that you finally have learned enough about the game to abuse the mechanics. And think of all the achievements! Ryukyu WC is also probably easier than ever before thanks to being Ming tributary. There are at least 3 different viable paths to win: 1. Slowly colonizing 2. No CB attack Indian minor (that was my path) 3. No CB attack Malaysian or Indonesian minor.

RE: Japan. Mainly to enjoy the new mechanics. Shogun has bunch of interactions with Daimyos and the 8 incidents can only fire with 30 years between each other. It is fairly easy to unify Japan by 1500 if that's your preference.

On annexing countries with colonies. Unless they fixed it, you could have two colonies in the same region... and two merchants. I learned this by freak accident when I inherited Portugal and picked up a bunch of merchants randomly.

I hate colonizing new world too. Have taken a liking to bass Alice countries with exploration and let them colonize. I even feed them gold to accelerate.

Come to think of it, this could be a worthwhile mechanic to abuse if you want to build a giant trade empire. Think about what havinga merchant in every node can do for trade income.

I think the longest trade chain is 26 provinces (north east asia -> england), so you need just 25 merchants. The rest give very marginal benefits you unless manage find another 20 or so merchants to fill another chain. You can get normally 12 from colonial nations and 15 from trade companies.

For most colonial regions 2 merchants is probably pretty much the maximum, you can't really control your vassals well enough.

The vassalizing is fun, just got to make sure they have the exploration first. One time I did vassalize Portugal who had 1 EU province left. That bastard moved his capitol to Brazil :/

Yo dudes, what do I buy. Cossacks, rights of men, or both?

Both.

New DLC finally has release date, 16 Nov. Really looking forward to it, adds bunch of interesting stuff:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2xUGb2NXgNI

I don't know. I still like playing Portugal and doing the whole colonization thing. After Cradle drops, I might have to play some Islamic countries.

Stay close to home and do Granada

Goofy another pretty fun game if you haven't played them is Poland, they even have a few country-specific achievements to give you a goal. You start pretty strong with free PU on Lithuania, some vassals, and a few easy areas for expansion like TO, but you need to pretty quickly utilize that strength because you will rapidly run out of places to expand and get trapped between Russia, Ottomans, Austria/HRE, and possibly denmark/sweden.

Definitely one of the strongest countries in the game, especially once you form Commonwealth, but Ottos and Rus are almost always going to be bigger and stronger and are eager to steal your land. Also gotta deal with 50%+ of your land being wrong religion, your land is fairly poor, and you have no good trade nodes. Just started a game as them, restarted until I got a game where Austria rivaled Bohemia at start, then I royal married->claimed throne and forced a PU on Bohemia. Since Austria is their rival they didn't accept the call to arms even though they were emperor, and with Lithuanian and vassal troops I easily defeated them. So now I'm Poland-Lithuania-Bohemia, and Silesia is still Bohemia's vassal.

Doesn't that require some luck now? Like, I thought they made it so that you can't claim throne on someone who doesn't share your dynasty.

In any case, Poland does sound fun and I've never played a Poland game before. Might wait a bit since I suspect it would be very similar (though harder) than my Russia game, in that I'm focusing the vast majority of my efforts on land wars.

I tried starting as Sweden a little bit ago and was doing well initially, but lost a war against Muscovy (was kinda unavoidable, they allied Denmark and I needed to try to keep them from beastmoding early on) that turned the game into a failboat.

I always like the idea of playing as a horde nation and then I start the game and have a trash economy and am like "why did I do this" (also in that category: trying for Timurids -> Mughals and dealing with **** economy and revolt) - are there any particularly good horde nations/strats?

Yeah need your dynasty on throne, but Brohemia starts in a interregnum iirc, so you royal marry and will probably get your dynasty on the throne. You can do the same trick to get them in PU as Austria starting off. If Austria rivals them you will probably get your dynasty on the throne because Austria won't royal marry.

Been a while since I played a horde but iirc basic horde strategy is just raze every single province you take and use the monarch points to tech, and take lots of tributaries and use them to farm manpower to keep your war machine going. GH is pretty fun as a horde, gotta kill off Moscow ASAP though, but you can be best friends with Ottomans. Of course that then will make it pretty similar to your Russia game. Manchurian tribes into Qing was pretty fun but no clue how it works now that China is OP with mandate of heaven.

I used to struggle with cash playing Poland. I started doing much better just asking for cash when I win wars. This has the benefit of keeping AE low, which also adds to income. The country you just beat up will end up broke and ready for reconquest when peace expires anyway.

Once I started doing that, Poland played a lot like Bradenburg to me. With Poland, I am slowly waiting to get rich while with Bradenburg I am waiting on military tech and manpower.

I generally take all enemy's cash in most early wars as first thing. (Partly because enemies might only have 1 province and partly because you don't want too much aggressive expansion.)

Me reading these posts like "oh hey Aragon looks fun"
- vassalize and integrate Navarra
- take a province from Tunis, but then they ally Ottomans and Tlemcen and Morocco ally each other
- Castile and England rival me
- ally France but they never want to join any of my wars
- spot Provence as a someone I can take some land from but Papal State takes their Mediterranean provinces before I can invade
- can never get a queen at the right time
- Castile has a 9 year regency but event doesn't fire; eventually they have a 15 year old king at the same time I have a 15 year old king and a 12 year old heir in 1489 (in other words, that event is never ever firing)
- boost development a bit and get rich off tax buildings, but nothing to spend it on with low army and navy forcelimits
- this game is a FAILBOAT

I should have read Nonfiction's post again first and tried the Byz strategy, I'll do that next time. I also need to prepare to have claims on as much of Italy as possible when 1490 and the Shadow Kingdom event hits.

OP Papal states (aka BIG PAPI) opening:

Excommunicate Florence
Max relations and ally austria, join HRE
Dec Florence using excommunication CB, fully annex. -50% AE from excommunication CB, -20% AE from being curia controller. Take 3 rich provinces, 57 dev, and no one is even that mad.

My strategy for my Aragon - Spain - HRE run was:

no CB Byz
Fabricate on Africa, try to get the center of trade, wage some wars there since there isn't much else to do.
(no CB Irish minor)
Take it slow, wait for iberian wedding to fire (inherit all wrong gender heirs unless they are godlike)

I think it is better to not take Navarra, since Castille wants it and contesting leads to unnecessary tension.

Subjugate Navarra happened to be the first mission I got, guess it doesn't matter too much.

I think I think inside the box too much when I play this game. Like, no CB byz seems pretty brilliant and it's something I never ever would have thought of on my own. What are you doing with Irish minors?!